Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

like Caspar Stieler and Georg Greflinger brought the coarse scenes of battle to life; Greflinger wrote the sombre Der deutschen dreissigjähriger Krieg (The German Thirty Years War) in 1657 while Stieler wrote priapic pornographic works glorifying male power under the pseudonym Filidor der Dorfferer, pieces which were clearly influenced by his experiences as a soldier. In Leave the Dead in Peace he warns the soldier Filidor that his lover will ‘crack jokes over your coffin and sing, whoop and caper on your grave … she will even batter your rotting bones herself’. But he promises to torment her, to frighten her with ‘thumping and bumping’ so that if bruises are found on her in the morning, ‘say that I have done it as my revenge.’²⁷ During the war itself thousands of tasteless, smutty and gruesome illustrated pamphlets were produced by the respective armies to frighten the inhabitants of local towns and to justify their own crude behaviour, and some of these survive.²⁸

      Above all the war resulted in the single most important German work of the seventeenth century, Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch, translated as Simplicius Simplicissimus, by Hans (or Johann) Grimmelshausen. He was born in Gelnhausen, Hesse, in 1622 but in 1635 Hessian and Croat soldiers ransacked his village. They kidnapped him and he was forced to spend the next fourteen years first as a boy soldier then as a musketeer; he eventually served in a number of regiments, only turning to writing in the last decade of his life. Simplicius Simplicissimus, first published in 1669, is a semi-autobiographical account of the war and is the most important of his works. The main character recounts how his family’s farm is destroyed, how the inhabitants of his village are tortured or raped, how he is carried off by Croat soldiers, falls into Swedish captivity and ends the war serving under the Protestant forces. Its impact influenced many later German writers; nearly three centuries later Bertolt Brecht based his play Mother Courage on Grimmelshausen’s character Landstörzerin Courasche, a woman who spent her life trailing behind Protestant troops on their campaigns through Sweden, Poland and Germany, and whose very existence had become entirely dependent on the continuation of the war.²⁹

      Within a decade of the beginning of the conflict the small mercantile town of Berlin had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Much of it had been destroyed by fire; the city was stripped of anything of value, the once proud citizens scratched out a meagre existence in the ruins, the roads were in terrible shape, the Spree was so clogged up it was unfit for trading vessels, agriculture was in a dire state and the Schloss was so badly damaged that it had to be propped up with wooden slats. Much had been destroyed; the artist-historian Joachim von Sandrart, who had survived the war, wrote that ‘Queen Germania saw her palaces and churches decorated with magnificent pictures go up in flames time and again, whilst her eyes were so blinded by smoke and tears that she no longer had the power or will to attend to art.’³⁰ The population of Berlin had plummeted from over 14,000 to a mere 6,000. It seemed for a time that the elector of Brandenburg would lose his title; as early as 1630 he had sent a plaintive letter to Vienna declaring, ‘No one knows how long I shall remain Elector and master in my own land.’ Berlin seemed destined to become little more than a ghost town. Then, suddenly, the Elector George William died. His successor would prove to be one of the most remarkable leaders in Berlin history; a man determined to ensure that war would never again rule his destiny. It was he who dragged Berlin from the wreckage and set it on its way to becoming the capital of Prussia. His name was Frederick William, and he came to be known as the ‘Great Elector’.

      Frederick William was a product of the Thirty Years War. Born in 1620, four years after the outbreak of war, Frederick William had spent many years in the safety of The Hague as a young man, where his Calvinism was reaffirmed along with its austerity and devotion to duty. Clever, dignified and utterly practical, he was well prepared to take power when his weak father died in December 1640. His greatest wish was to see the creation of a strong, independent state which would never again be at the mercy of marauding armies or dependent on the patronage of other rulers. It was he who would first brand Berlin with the mark of austerity, militarism, religious tolerance, devotion to duty and an undue respect for authority for which it became famous; it was he who ushered in the beginning of the rise of Prussia.

      Frederick William had much to do. The war still raged around him, his territory was wrecked, his people desperate. The Mark was occupied by Swedish troops, Berlin was a ruin, his own slovenly army lived by moving from town to town and was as hated as the foreign troops. The elector was forced to remain in Königsberg as the Berlin Schloss was uninhabitable. If Frederick William was to bring peace to his territory his first move must be to secure an agreement between Brandenburg and the Swedes and he sent ambassadors to Stockholm to ask for a suspension of hostilities. By May 1641 they had agreed on terms; by October Brandenburg and Sweden had divided Pomerania while Stettin went to Sweden in return for a favourable settlement for Prussia of the Cleves-Jülich lands. With the Swedish flank secured Frederick William formed an alliance with the House of Orange in order to gain Dutch support. In 1643 he felt confident enough to move back to Berlin.

      The desire for peace spread through Europe: Queen Christina of Sweden encouraged the French to negotiate and other powers followed suit – often out of sheer exhaustion and in the realization that the military capacity for total victory was beyond the grasp of any one country.³¹ Talks continued between the delegates of 109 states from 1643 to 1648, although fighting continued throughout – as the Catholic Prior Adami of Murrhart put it, ‘In winter we negotiate, in summer we fight.’ The people of Europe were desperate for peace; a Swabian family put in their diary of 1647, ‘They say that the terrible war is now over. But there is still no sign of a peace. Everywhere there is envy, hatred and greed: that’s what the war has taught us … We live like animals, eating bark and grass. No one could have imagined that anything like this would happen to us. Many say that there is no God.’³² Nevertheless progress was made and after much haggling an agreement was reached. Rumours of a settlement spread until on 24 October 1648, after thirty years of misery and months of negotiation, the European powers signed the Peace of Westphalia to an outpouring of rejoicing in the Mark Brandenburg. The music composed for the peace included some of the most powerful Lutheran hymns ever written, including Justus Schotel’s extraordinary Friedens Sieg.

      The peace was an uneasy one. War had exacerbated the rivalry between France and Spain, between Richelieu and the Habsburgs, between the king of Sweden and the Dutch, between the Russian tsar and the Poles, and between the dozens of German princes and electors. But the peace had also resulted in compromises between Protestants and Catholics, and between the Holy Roman Emperor and individual German princes. It was the latter which would prove so advantageous to the young elector of Brandenburg. The war had weakened the Holy Roman Empire and strengthened regional leaders, including the electors of Bohemia, Saxony, Hanover and the young Frederick William of Brandenburg, who was determined to take advantage of the power vacuum in Europe. Ironically it was France which opened the way for the ambitious German elector. By shattering Austrian might France had laid the foundations for the creation of a new power in Germany – a ‘third power’ to curb both Austria and Sweden. Frederick William was happy to fill the gap. To his relief many rival German princes chose this moment of peace to withdraw from politics and to put their energies and their money into prestigious projects like palaces and art collections and parties. Their courts expanded exponentially and were paid for by their subjects; the minister in Berlin, Count Manteuffel, said of these petty princes that despite their often dubious birth ‘one would think they were put on earth to ride roughshod over their fellow men’.³³ They also created some of the most beautiful court-cities in Europe.

      Frederick William was different. While his rivals amused themselves the hard-headed elector of Brandenburg set about consolidating his territory. In 1657 he signed the Peace of Wehlau and in 1660 the Peace of Oliva, which marked the end of the Swedish-Polish war.³⁴ Those in the eastern provinces who refused to obey him were punished: Colonel von Kalckstein, who, like many Junkers, preferred to ally himself with the more easy-going Polish nobility, was executed; the rest were forced to bow to Berlin. The elector of Brandenburg now ruled over a new entity which would eventually be referred to by a single name: Prussia.

      In the nineteenth century historians of the Prussian school, including Sybel and Treitschke, were determined to show that the rise of their state was ‘inevitable’; that it had been